Governance reform and climate change response

This paper focuses on Indonesian government-driven initiative on critical forest and degraded land rehabilitation. We employ Governance System Analysis (GSA) to diagnose various efforts that have been made by various actors in affecting and managing the rehabilitation of critical forests and degraded land. This study uses Wonosobo District as a case study because it has the largest forest coverage in Central Java Province and has a relatively high amount of land with critical condition. The application of GSA suggests improvement in terms of connectivity to reduce strong segregation between authorities managing the forest and capacity of an involved participant in strategy formulation, implementation and monitoring, and evaluation. The study finds it difficult to locate such governance reforms in the major classification of climate change strategies, either mitigation or adaptation. The reform is neither directly reducing the concentration of greenhouse gases nor is an adjustment of the system to the changing of climatic patterns. In the absence of such governance reform, however, prospect to maximize the contribution of forest environmental services to combat climate change are constrained.